Community by Conor Wadle

An anonymous person once said, “Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is a progress, and working together is success.” This quote and this idea explain exactly what happens at National Avenue Christian Church. Not only have we kept together as a community, through easy and hard times, we’ve stuck together. Furthermore, as we can see, we’ve worked together to do amazing things recently.

Keeping together is one of the biggest parts of this. Not only have we kept together, we’ve been able to value every part of our community equally. Every Sunday for a little while now, we’ve begun service with a younger member of the community speaking in front of us. As a part of the youth, I’ve seen how much this church allows its younger members to contribute. Many of the youth as well as me have been the Worship Leader on Sundays. Many of the High Schoolers are deacons as well. And those are just ways that our youth are a part of the community. Our church stands out in more than just letting our youth be involved. Our church also welcomes gays and lesbians, something that most churches don’t. This community has grown into a huge collection of people, who, while we may not all believe the exact same thing, all come together to help others.

Just look at what we’re doing in Nicaragua. Our church has raised the money to build 25 homes in Nicaragua. We raised the money to do this. Something that is as big as this was only successful because we are a community. Without the entire church working together, we couldn’t have done it. The youth’s sleepouts and car washes were almost completely successful because of the backing of the rest of the community.

It’s amazing to see what we as a church can do, when we keep together, and when we work together. We’ve seen that this church has the ability to achieve amazing things. But we have to make sure that we don’t stop here, because we shouldn’t be asking what we’ve done. But instead, what we can do. Because as we learned from Laura’s sermon on Sunday, that’s what can make the difference between a good community, and a great community.